One Fat Englishman

by Kingsley Amis

  Roger started on the drawers of the desk. None was locked and all were at least half full of typescripts in cardboard folders. In general they seemed far less recent than the correspondence and went one stage further than the novels on the shelves in having no past as well as no present or future. This pre-natal graveyard of the written word was a healthy and cheering sight but it offered the puzzling suggestion that at one time Atkins must have done some work of a sort. How could that have come about? Roger cheered up a little at the thought that he was never going to have the chance of finding out that or anything else to do with Strode Atkins.

  This brought on the arrival in Roger’s head of a fully formed notion, the first for some minutes. It was not unlikely that one of these drawers was the abode of Perne in a Gyre, the sole literary utterance of that talentless nuclear-disarmer brother-in-law of his who believed all British publishers to be leagued against him in an imperialist and unnecessary conspiracy. And the recovery of this typescript must substantially improve his standing with Pamela. ‘Managed to get my hands on it somehow. Took a bit of doing, but . . .’ – ‘Oh, Roger, you didn’t. How marvellous.’ After a drink of water he began a systematic search of the desk drawers. In time he came to one next to the bottom which resisted his efforts to pull it out. It had no handle and was unusually full, so much so that the top layer of stuff kept catching against the inside of the frame. But it was not locked and a few Joe-like tugs did the trick. Half-way down, between two tattered folders, he came upon a small oddly-sized book bound in marbled paper on boards. He picked it up clumsily and an oblong card fluttered out from between the pages. The brownish handwriting on it was hard to read. It seemed to say:

  Lord H 1 lash

  Wm 2 lashes

  Watts 3 lashes

  Gabriel 10 lashes

  Algernon 50 lashes

  Three minutes later Roger was certain that, while the contents of the notebook might not be the best of Swinburne, or the most creditable of Swinburne, or even the most rewardingly discreditable of Swinburne, they were Swinburne. As such they demanded to be removed from American hands. Their other demands could be gone into in due course. He had all the time in the world to fill the drawer again and close it, to put the notebook away in one of the special inner pockets of his jacket, before the expected taxi arrived below the window. He had the lights off within a couple of seconds and had been standing in position, his hand on the switch, for nearly a minute when he heard the lift gates.

  Sixteen

  The effect was all he could have hoped for. When he put the light on Helene cried out and her body jerked twice. Even Macher took a second or two to restore his eyes and mouth to normal. Then he grinned and said:

  ‘This is very clever of you, Mr Micheldene. Obviously you have an excellent memory for some things. I never thought you were listening when Strode told me I could use this place.’

  ‘Oh, I do a fair amount of listening,’ Roger said in his quietest voice. In the last few hours he had wondered from time to time what he was going to do if and when his moment came. Now he knew, at least as regards the opening moves. But there was no rush. ‘I think perhaps I’ve managed to work out what my role in your life is. Fortunately it’s one that can be adequately defined in terms of practical demonstration, so there’s no need for me to bother with words.’ He advanced on Macher, who stood his ground. Roger went on: ‘Let’s see how you get on when it comes to using violence in defence of someone you like or love.’

  He was still not within range when Helene strode forward. Her thin lips were thinner than usual. ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ she said in level, decided tones. ‘If anybody hits anybody, if anybody so much as touches anybody I go right out that door and I never speak to either of you again ever. Is that clear? Roger, is that clear?’

  He found it hard to answer. To explain how he felt about hitting Macher and not hitting Macher seemed to him of unique importance, but however carefully he put it he was doubtful whether she would understand, or even try to. He shook his head slowly and blinked. ‘But I wasn’t going to really . . . hurt him,’ he pointed out. ‘Only fists. No foot or knee or anything like that. Nothing below the belt, honestly. No rough stuff at all.’

  ‘If you lay a finger on him you’re through. I mean it.’

  Roger still felt uneloquent. After a moment he gave a loud sneering snuffle. ‘How does it feel,’ he asked Macher, ‘to have your lady-love pleading for your life? A real man wouldn’t be able to—’

  ‘Just fine. She’s much more persuasive than I’d know how. And I’m not a real man. I’m a very unreal man. You’re the real man around here.’

  ‘You’re a child, not a man,’ Roger shouted. ‘Men have to learn to play by the rules, damn it, but not you. Oh no. You want something so you just take it. Don’t know what it means to earn the right to something. Just come crashing in and . . . Like all your bloody countrymen. It’d be funny if it weren’t so terrifying. You freckled fool.’

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ Macher asked, doing so circumspectly on the edge of the sofa. ‘Of course, I realize this is rather unfair on you, not being allowed to hit me. I suppose one does—’

  ‘Think yourself bloody lucky you’re being protected. I’d have reduced you to pulp in two minutes. Less than that. Ten seconds. That’s the trouble, you’re pulp already. One tap would lay you out. You’d be grovelling and pleading and begging me not to—’

  ‘It certainly would and I certainly would,’ Macher said with conviction. ‘I haven’t been hit since I was twelve years old. I didn’t like it then and nothing’s happened meanwhile to change the way I feel about it.’

  ‘You’re just a miserable smooth-talking posturing little coward.’

  ‘A coward, certainly. But what you don’t seem to understand, Mr Micheldene, is that this is all right with me. It gives me a tremendous advantage over you. I’m not only a coward, I’m also a liar and a thief and I value worldly success too much – I’m not as spiritual as you – and I have other defects we needn’t go into right now. But the point is I know all this and I don’t mind. Now if you were more adaptable you’d find out something about me I did mind and you’d work on that. It’s getting kind of late in the day, though, for any such innovations on your part, isn’t it?’

  ‘Macher, before this thing of yours gets any worse I’d seriously advise you to put your pride in your pocket and go and see somebody really good.’

  ‘Sorry – that’s another rubber arrow. If being the way I am includes a neurosis of some sort, as it probably does, then let it. In any event – sticks and stones may break my bones, only we’re agreed sticks and stones are out, and words will never hurt me, no words you’re likely to think of uttering anyhow, so what are you going to do?’

  ‘Going to do?’

  ‘Precisely so. What are you going to do? What’s your personal policy for the next few hours, more particularly for the next one?’

  Helene had been standing nowhere in particular near by, staring angrily at Roger all the time. Now she joined in: ‘Why don’t you just go away, Roger? There’s nothing for you to do here. You’re not going to have a fight and we’ve nothing to say to you and you’ve nothing to say to us. So go home.’

  ‘I’ve plenty to say to you, young woman, make no mistake about that, and you’re going to—’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Helene put her hands over her face. ‘I don’t want to hear. If only you knew how much I don’t want to hear. I just want to go to bed.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure of that.’

  She snatched her hands away from her face. ‘Get out of my sight, you fat slob. How I ever let you touch me I can’t—’

  ‘No, Helene,’ Macher interrupted, ‘not like that. That’s the way he likes it. We do it differently. Look, let me show you.’ He put his tongue out at Roger and chanted: ‘The British are coming, the British are coming. Shoot the British, shoot the British. Roger came bottom of the class – yah-yah de yah-yah, yah-yah de yah-yah.’ He put his
thumbs on his ears and waggled his fingers. ‘Roger can’t write, Roger can’t figure, wow wow wow, wow wow wow.’

  ‘Fellow’s . . . fellow’s absolutely . . . How you could ever have . . . with a fellow . . . Marry a fine chap like Ernst and then . . . with a fellow . . .’

  ‘Leave Ernst out of this, do you mind?’ Helene said, her mouth sticking out.

  At this verbal cue Roger’s mind came a little way out of its trough. ‘Well, you certainly managed to leave him out, didn’t you? Nice chap like that, I don’t understand how you could do it. Practically out of his mind with worry, do you realize that? I saw him this evening, spent a long time with him as a matter of fact, and the poor devil was practically out of his mind. With worry. How you could have—’

  ‘Nonsense, he knows I’ll be back. I set everything up so that he needn’t—’

  ‘To your way of thinking you may have set everything up to perfection, but I know different. In those far-off days when you were coming away with me this week-end, before you changed your mind in your little feminine way and decided you preferred this frightful young shit . . . What happened to the idea that you were going to visit your aunt in Cincinnati? Arthur thought you were, but Ernst had no illusions about—’

  ‘I just found I couldn’t lie to him.’ For the first time Helene’s manner showed lack of confidence. ‘I was ready to but I found I couldn’t. But he knows I’ll be back.’

  A keening, almost elegiac note entered Roger’s voice. ‘Why did you do it, darling? Oh, why did you have to do it? Why did you have to be so angry with me?’ His voice steadied. ‘You were angry with me, weren’t you?’

  ‘I certainly was. But it doesn’t matter now.’

  Roger’s mind’s eye was momentarily filled with an image of Saturday night. ‘You had no reason to be. Nothing happened. All she did was bite me. Here, you can look if you want.’

  ‘I don’t want to look. Look at what? – What’s this about, Irving, do you know?’

  Macher had been doing his laugh, more slowly and quietly than usual. ‘I’m afraid I do a little. He made a play for Suzanne on that island Saturday night and she bit him and then he didn’t make a play for her any more. – I’m sorry about that, by the way. I guess I was partly responsible. Not for the bite: that was Suzanne’s idea and it rather shocked me. Very crude. I’d hoped she’d have had more imagination. She’s surprisingly immature in some ways. Oh, she’s a nice girl but she’s a little too sold on my ideas. Not enough independence of judgement. Have to give her time.’

  ‘How do you come into this?’ Helene asked Macher.

  ‘Suzanne and I decided it might be fun to see how Mr Micheldene would react if he got the impression she might be available. I suppose it occurred to me first. But then I had a special interest in it. I already knew I had some chance of making you – I didn’t know how good a chance. It was easy enough to see our English friend was very interested in you. I wanted to find out how exclusive this interest was. I got the answer. Not very.’

  Helene nodded tiredly.

  ‘You mean you didn’t know anything about this Suzanne business?’ Roger asked.

  She shook her head. ‘How could I?’

  ‘I thought you saw us. I thought I saw someone watching us wearing that white dress of yours.’

  ‘Oh, I spy on necking couples, do I?’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Your anxiety was unnecessary. I wasn’t wearing that dress that evening.’

  ‘You weren’t? Well, what made you so angry with me? What had I done?’

  ‘You’d behaved like you.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘If you folks will excuse me,’ Macher said, ‘I guess I’ll go take a bath. Or maybe a shower. I’ll see how I feel when I get there.’

  When he had gone, Helene said: ‘All right then, Roger. Since you ask me. It was wrong of me ever to say I’d come away with you. But you’d just been nice the way you sometimes are, without meaning to be, not trying to get something out of me. Then I thought too, if I could do this it would stop me feeling bad about you for quite a while, so—’

  ‘Feeling bad about me? Why do you feel bad about me? How?’

  ‘When I go to bed with you I feel less sorry for you, you bug me less, I stop feeling responsible for you, and when you’re awful I can just be bored with you and mad at you in the same way I might at anyone else, it doesn’t get me all tensed up and involved, so when you insisted on trying to call Maynard Parrish that afternoon when you could have been with me a little longer I was just disappointed, I wasn’t all . . . disturbed and . . .’

  ‘Is that the only reason you’ve gone to bed with me, because you feel . . .? Haven’t you enjoyed it, ever?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know, would you? It’s all for you, all that, isn’t it? You think of it and you do it. Like a lot of men. You know, the first few years I slept with people I thought it was all a thing they did to you. If you happened to enjoy it and you showed it that was all right, that was fine because it told them how good they were, but you didn’t have to enjoy it too much because you weren’t there for that. Then I met someone who looked at me sometimes when he was making love to me, didn’t keep his eyes shut all the time the way the rest of them did. He knew I was there. From start to finish. So I married him.’

  Roger saw with astonishment that a bottle of whisky had appeared on a near-by shelf. Macher and Helene must have brought it back with them, he concluded. He opened it and took two hefty swigs. ‘You don’t like me at all,’ he said, coughing. ‘Do you?’

  ‘It isn’t that. You don’t like me.’

  ‘Helene, I love you. I love you and I want to marry you.’

  ‘Maybe you do, but you don’t like me. You know when I decided I wasn’t coming away with you? Saturday night when I was driving you into town to see your priest. The way you talked to me then.’

  ‘But I was drunk then. I didn’t know what I was saying. What did I say? I bet you can’t remember either. Come on, what did I say?’

  ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t listening, I was doing my best not to notice what you said. But I couldn’t not notice the way you were saying it. You were saying it the way someone talks when he doesn’t like the person he’s talking to. When I realized that it was much worse than any time you’ve been awful.’

  ‘If I mean as little as that to you,’ Roger said, taking another swig and putting the bottle back on the shelf, ‘why did you ever say you’d even consider coming away with me for good?’

  ‘You’ve no idea how much this has worried me. I guess I couldn’t face telling you right there and then it was out of the question. It was cowardly of me and I was a fool, I knew I was a fool as soon as I told you I’d think about it. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said what I did.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, I don’t think I ever really believed it.’

  Helene chewed hard at her thumbnail. ‘Roger, will you go now?’

  ‘I do love you. I wish I was better at it.’

  ‘Christ, will you go, please?’

  Macher came back from the bathroom, carrying his clothes, a towel wrapped round him. His manner was different now. He said sharply to Roger: ‘Why are you still hanging around? What good are you doing? Helene, why didn’t you send him away? I have a lot of tolerance ordinarily but by Jesus it’s beginning to run out now. Go away, Mr Micheldene. Nobody wants you here. If you’ve nowhere to go then go just the same.’

  ‘Irving, listen to me a minute, will you?’ Helene said.

  ‘Sure, what is it?’

  ‘You’re not here so as to . . . as a way of showing you’re better than him, are you? You didn’t bring me here to bug him, did you?’

  Macher smiled. He shifted his shoes from one hand to the other and put his arm round Helene. ‘No, it isn’t why I’m here. I think I’m better than he is anyhow. Maybe I’m not really but I think I am. A view I could defend in argument any time you say. Any ti
me but right now, that is. No, I’m not here because of him. That’s why you’re here. Oh, don’t let’s be neat about this – of course that’s not the only reason you’re here, perhaps not even the main one. I don’t know. But we can leave that for the moment. What we can’t leave is the immediate breaking-off of Anglo-American relations.’ With his arm still round Helene he turned to Roger. ‘I told you to shove off. Shove off.’

  ‘Please, Roger.’

  ‘It’s such a long way,’ Roger said. ‘Right up the other end of town. And it’s so late.’

  ‘You can get a cab.’

  ‘I might not be able to. And it’s so cold there, in my flat.’

  ‘If it is it’s the only place south of Maine that is,’ Macher said. ‘Go to bed in your clothes.’

  ‘Can’t I stay here, in that little room? I promise I’ll keep out of your way in the morning. Please.’

  ‘Please doesn’t get you a bed under this roof. Go . . . away.’

  ‘Oh, let him stay, Irving. What difference does it make?’

  ‘You’ve got a point there.’ He looked at Helene, at the ceiling, and at Roger. ‘All right. But absolute silence must be maintained. No charging in with a fresh argument at five a.m. Agreed?’

  ‘Yes,’ Roger said. ‘Thanks. Well . . . good night.’

  He was arranging his trousers over a chair by the bed when Macher came into the room. ‘I understand you’re going back to England in a few days,’ he said, ‘so I’d better tie up the loose ends now. I don’t know whether you were going to make an offer for Blinkie Heaven but if you were don’t bother. Strode Atkins tells me he can get me a better deal and I believe him. The other thing is this. I sometimes got the impression that you think some of the people in this country don’t like you because you’re British. That isn’t so. We’re out of the redcoat era now, even if you aren’t. And we don’t think in this way. We don’t have group likes and dislikes. It isn’t your nationality we don’t like, it’s you.’